Lauda told Hamilton to remove machine gun video

Niki Lauda ordered that a video of Lewis Hamilton firing a machine gun be removed from the reigning world champion’s social media accounts.

On Saturday, a controversy exploded when the video emerged depicting the Mercedes driver firing the weapon at a shooting range, just one day after news broke of a gunman opening fire on a passenger train from Amsterdam to France.

Briton Hamilton said a “friend” had posted the video, not him.

Nonetheless, it triggered outrage among some of his fans, but Hamilton played that down by insisting “There never is any good comments on there, to be honest, so it doesn’t really matter.”

But Mercedes team chairman and F1 legend Niki Lauda begged to differ, even though he defended the 30-year-old, whose lifestyle has been increasingly under the microscope recently.

“I know Lewis well and know that he means well,” Lauda told Bild newspaper. “But I’ll ask him to remove the video from the internet.”

The German news agency SID, meanwhile, quoted Hamilton’s boss Toto Wolff as saying: “Lewis is a rock star, but at the same time you also have to see what is happening in the world.” (GMM)